I just received my Spring 2005 issue of the Michigan Alumnus magazine. One of the articles was entitled, "The Institute for Social Research: Interdisciplinary, International, Influential" (full text not available from the magazine's website).
The Institute, widely known as the ISR, was where nearly all the social psychology faculty and graduate students had their offices during the 1980s (and perhaps before). East Hall, which houses the psychology department and all its subdisciplinary components, opened some time in the early '90s.
Today, I would say, the ISR is best known for conducting at least four prominent national surveys: the Monitoring the Future (on high school seniors' drug use), National Election Study, Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and Consumer Sentiment surveys.
Although my primary research area for nearly the last 15 years has been adolescent and young-adult drinking, I mainly conducted laboratory experiments during my graduate school years (in the ISR's basement labs) and never had any connection to the Monitoring the Future project (the only 1980s-era student from the social psych grad program I can think of who worked on Monitoring the Future was Greg Diamond; you can see here where he has some publications from that work).
One of the undergraduate courses I teach at Texas Tech University is called Problems of Adolescence; I regularly refer to findings from the Monitoring the Future study in that class. In my other undergrad course, Research Methods, I draw upon various ISR studies as occasions warrant.
Some of the key areas covered in the Michigan Alumnus article (which was not very long) were:
*The potential applications of ISR research to public policy.
*ISR's role in helping develop social science research centers around the world.
*The long history of experimental/laboratory social research within ISR's Research Center for Group Dynamics.
*ISR's long history also in the field of longitudinal research.
Today, many UM social psych professors retain an ISR appointment, as seen on this list (not everyone on this list is a UM social psych professor; the social psych program is big, but not that big). Also, talks and other events continue to be held at ISR.
Although the ISR probably does not play as central a role in most social psych grad students' training as it once did, it is one of the many outstanding academic resources at UM.